did anyone actually use Hunch seriously?
Impressive back-end tech (the recommendation engine) that can now process millions and millions of items on eBay to help increase sales (something like a quarter of Amazon's sales come from recommendations).
Netflix had their own and paid a million dollars as prize payout for an absolutely state of the art system.
If it really was just a tech acquisition they massively overpaid.
Obviously eBay must see other reasons for the acquisition than just the tech itself.
Also, if it's also in large part a talent acquisition then they're going to paying more than 80 million since they're going to need to pay for some new pairs of golden handcuffs to keep the talent around.
At scale it is. More here:
http://www.quora.com/Hunch/Is-Hunch-actually-doing-anything-... (this one got a vote from one of the founders)
MS bought Powerset (and their NLP-type search engine) for $100m in 2008. They also bought Farecast (travel pricing forecasting) for $75-115m in 2008.
Hunch for $80m is a steal, as far as talent acquisitions go.
EDIT: I'm not sure if they were product or talent acquisitions, but does it really matter? All companies listed above obtained state-of-the-art algorithms and the teams that developed them.
There's a different kind of bubble in the valley, it's a contained ecosystem that people get caught up in. Similar to the social bubble surrounding a college or church. People inside the bubble often cannot see the forest from the trees.
In the bubble it's easy to get to know all the trees, but from the outside it's just a forest and few trees are easily recognized or stand out from the others at all.